April 30, 2006

Today, I have been taking a brief look at Antarian ship designs with the hopes of eventually modifying them to make them a stronger opponent. In the game there are two types of ships generated by the Antarians. Those that are for defending the Antarian homeworld and those that are for Attacking the other players. There are currently only slight differences in the designs.

I have summarized the designs in the following tables:

In my opinion these ships are to weak and their attacks are to infrequent to matter. It is far to easy to stop the Antarian invasions even early in the game. The small ships are easily destroyed with missiles due to lack of pd weapons and the large ships don't come early enough.

I am currently working on a mod to change a few things with the antarians. I hope to include the following:

8 comments:

Nice Ideas. I propose Raider attacks between turn 60-100 with internal stabilizers and jammers combo (above 100 missile evasion in this case negates the simple mirv defense.) Later better jammers etc. I think that the AI doesnt know to use pd effectively...so I prefer evasion strategy.

About your save with the large fleet:Keep in mind that there is still the timewarp-phase cloak exploit. I was still able to destroy Antares in turn 3 or so (4 doomstars kill the large fleet within 50 combatrounds).

Mmm...I miss my captured harbringer. I had thousands to doom stars briseling with assault shuttles ( I think those are the ones that can capture enemy ships). Maybe you could increase the chance of them to self-destruct?

I noticed a few additional thing. The ships are equiped with different missile evasion tech (ECM jammer, Multi-Wave Ecm Jammer, Wide Area Jammer) depending on the game difficulty. The tables above show the impossible difficulty.

Also, the Black hole generators in the bottom slot on the offensive Harbinger are random. It doesn't matter though, the AI only fires one black hole generator from one slot (so it fires 2 because there are 2 slots with black hole generators).

I think it would be a good idea to tie the tougher Antareans to the game's difficulty level. Some of us still can have a tough time against them as they are, and the game is NOT about being destroyed by Antareans, it's about waxing the bastards and withstanding the occasional irritant attacks. If the Antareans attack much more strongly, it will drain all the fun out of the game.

Afterall, we want to play a game that we are capable of winning more often than not, not one that we lose nearly always.

I wouldn't advise messing with the self-destruct much either, since they're tough enough to capture as it is (in the dozens of games I've played, I capture less than 1 Antarean ship per game on average).

Beefing up Antarean defenses in their system, I don't have much problem with, so long as you don't go insane with it. It's already at the point where I can more easily conquer the whole galaxy than beat them, but having them rebuild lost ships a little faster would be good.

It is pretty easy to stop them currently. You just need mirved missiles. (You get this missile mod after researching 2 further techfields in the chemistry path. F.e., the field pollproc/merculites gives you mirved nukes, but you have to research zort for mirved merculites.)